The Moray, the Italdesign show car designed by Giorgetto and Fabrizio Giugiaro is both a celebration of the Corvette legend and the realisation of a dream long cherished by the two Turin designers.
The Cover Story in Auto & Design no. 140 describes the background to the project, the ideas that inspired it, the concepts and the design cues that drove it from first sketch to working prototype.
“We’d been planning to do something with the Corvette brand for a long time”, explains Fabrizio Giugiaro. “That’s been an American passion we’ve shared for years. Back in 1962, my father designed the Testudo prototype on a Corvair floorpan, but we’d done nothing since then with a brand that is, after all, as much an icon for America as Ferrari is for us Italians”.
A silhouette designed with a single pencil stroke creates a line of the utmost, unforced simplicity that proclaims the Moray’s roadster vocation, despite its being totally enclosed by a roof structure topped off with a transparent dome. Those, at first glance, are the salient features of the Corvette Moray.
” This car”, continues Fabrizio, “forcefully announces its roadster essence. The dome is a neutral element: it’s there but barely visible. Our entire approach was an exercise in carefully coordinated surfaces and shapes rubbed down until they seem to grow out of the lines”.
The distinctive traits of Italdesign proliferate all over this show car, inside and out, but without disguising its Corvette parentage, which fans will identify in such unmistakable features as the round tail lights, the “eyeless” face and the symmetrical cockpit layout.
The article continues in Auto & Design no. 140
